Return to Eden

Azim Premji’s foray into Kolkata is probably the best news coming out of the city for a long time. While Wipro will have 6,000 people in its Salt Lake electronics complex once the facility begins operations, the company’s chief has also asked the government for a 40-acre plot, twice the size of Eden Gardens, in the emerging Rajarhat township in Kolkata.

Once ready, the size of the campus will be second only to Wipro’s main campus in Bangalore, and bigger than the Wipro facility in Hyderabad. Even before Mr Premji’s meeting with Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee hit the headlines, the state had been making relatively good progress — with its Rs 1,200 -crore IT industry growing at 70-80 per cent a year.

Indeed, so great is the demand for IT space, a new IT park at Durgapur was opened just yesterday, and another at Kharagpur will open at the end of the month. The Salt Lake authorities have earmarked another 185 acres for IT and IT-enabled services, Sunrise City has another 40 acres, and Rajarhat has 200.

The government organised motor racing on the four-laned road from Rajarhat to the airport a couple of months ago, to highlight its quality!

With an abundant supply of low-cost engineers, at salaries between a half and a third of those in Bangalore, IBM plans to double its workforce in the city by the end of the year. This will then be IBM’s biggest operations in the country after Bangalore, according to state government officials. Strikes, so much a part of the psyche of Kolkata, have been banned in the IT industry which has been given the status of a ‘public utility’.

The state has managed to make some headway in other sectors as well. Some 500 downstream units have come up around Haldia Petrochemicals in the last few years, and these include Mitsubishi’s Rs 1,600-crore PTA plant, and South Asia Petro’s Rs 450-crore PET resin plant.

Around 3.6 million tonnes of new cement capacity has come up in the last two-three years, quadrupling the capacity in the state. And there are 93 iron and steel projects in the pipeline with an investment of nearly Rs 2,000 crore. By the standards of states like Karnataka, leave alone Gujarat and Maharashtra, these are not very big numbers, but for a state given up by many as lost, these are reassuring strides.

Apart from the work done to make sure the state has excess power capacity (small amounts are even exported to Delhi every day), the biggest sign of change in bureaucratic attitudes is that the Haldia Development Authority keeps a bank of 1,000 acres of land on a continuous basis, so that land can be allotted to investors without delay.

While the state enjoys its new momentum, losing it will be equally easy. The Indian Chamber of Commerce in Kolkata has projected a shortage of skilled workers within a year unless some action is taken on increasing supply.

Since the state has a fragile fisc, building infrastructure isn’t going to be easy. Most important, it requires just a few well-publicised bandhs to turn the clock back.